Man and his world : an Indian, a secretary and a queer child : Expo 67 and the nation in Canada

Read today as a "bright and shining" moment, or as the "last good year" in Pierre Berton's estimation, a period that has since slid into the current crises of nationhood, Expo 67 is seen to mark a "turning point" in the complexion of the nation. This representation of history became entrenched as we passed through the thirtieth anniversary of Expo 67 and as monumental national events threatened to divide Canada permanently, producing a yearning for a simpler and better epoch when Canada was seen to be united. Man and His World attempts to rethink the unity 1967 is now seen to possess and challenges this nostalgic refiguration as well as theoretical concepts that regard the nation as a singular entity. Although Expo 67 was produced to unite Canada, fissures were present within the discourses on the nation as they were on the Expo 67 site itself. This thesis, which emphasizes the fragment, multiplicity and the surface, interrogates three sites at Expo 67 which show us that "'adding to' need not 'add up,' but may disturb the calculation" of nationhood (Bhabha, 1994:155): the Indians of Canada Pavilion, the Man in the Home Pavilion and the Quebec Pavilion. Each of these sites produced a challenge to the definition of the nation being performed in 1967, although not without problems. Man and His World investigates the possibilities and the limits of these challenges, while employing a methodology based on multiplicity, an attribute "thinking the nation" necessitates

From the painted past to digital futures : (re)mediating the Canadian nation at Expo 2000

With the theme Humankind: Nature: Technology: A New World Arising , Expo 2000 was billed as the central event of the celebrations of the millennial year. As a "new world arising", Expo 2000 was to be an innovative model for universal exhibitions that would distinguish itself from the modernism within which expo originated by positioning sustainable development at the core of the event. Moving away from the tourist of former universal exhibitions, Expo 2000 interpellated its visitors as agents who had choices about the type of world they wished to "arise" in the future. In what I have termed a performative pedagogy of ethical action the tourist was transformed into a historical subject with an important role to play in sustaining the earth. Canada, for its part, produced an enormous pavilion in an already existing trade fair space. It is this pavilion that forms the nucleus of the present dissertation, with three central chapters dedicated to each of the three thematic elements of the expo--humankind, nature and technology--and intersected by the three thematic areas of the Canada pavilion itself--"Spirit of Community", "Stewards of the Land" and "Connecting with the Future". Using historical traditions of national representation--landscape and multiculturalism--and modernizing these simultaneously, the Canada pavilion remediated the nation in ways that are problematic and productive simultaneously. The Canada pavilion was very adept in its primary goal of educating its visitors about the nation by engaging pedagogical models that not only "taught" in traditional terms via the rationality of the mind, but also by engaging the body as a pedagogical site. As Walter Benjamin suggested many years ago, the subject is undergoing a complex refiguration through its engagement with technology. This point was mobilized in the pavilion to produce a pedagogical form that is new to universal exhibitions, a hybrid form that I have termed politicotechnoedutainment in an attempt to grasp the crossings and imbrications of pedagogical models used in the pavilion. How these were leashed to national forms proved to be a problem, but this dissertation argues that the resulting "confusion" on the part of visitors to the pavilion is productive both for universal exhibitions and nations, an entry point into the presupposition of seamlessness in national representation where an open-ended, unfixed and transitional model of representation and the nation might be productively established

Para-infectious brain injury in COVID-19 persists at follow-up despite attenuated cytokine and autoantibody responses

To understand neurological complications of COVID-19 better both acutely and for recovery, we measured markers of brain injury, inflammatory mediators, and autoantibodies in 203 hospitalised participants; 111 with acute sera (1–11 days post-admission) and 92 convalescent sera (56 with COVID-19-associated neurological diagnoses). Here we show that compared to 60 uninfected controls, tTau, GFAP, NfL, and UCH-L1 are increased with COVID-19 infection at acute timepoints and NfL and GFAP are significantly higher in participants with neurological complications. Inflammatory mediators (IL-6, IL-12p40, HGF, M-CSF, CCL2, and IL-1RA) are associated with both altered consciousness and markers of brain injury. Autoantibodies are more common in COVID-19 than controls and some (including against MYL7, UCH-L1, and GRIN3B) are more frequent with altered consciousness. Additionally, convalescent participants with neurological complications show elevated GFAP and NfL, unrelated to attenuated systemic inflammatory mediators and to autoantibody responses. Overall, neurological complications of COVID-19 are associated with evidence of neuroglial injury in both acute and late disease and these correlate with dysregulated innate and adaptive immune responses acutely